JC Whitney Affiliate Program

I’ve found myself on a kick of writing about auto parts affiliate programs. For reference, you can find my article on the Advance Auto Parts Affiliate Program here and the Autozone Affiliate Program here. Today I’m going to write about the JC Whitney Affiliate Program.

Company Background

JC Whitney is one of the oldest auto parts retailers. The company was founded in 1915 as a scrap metal yard in Chicago. Headquarters were moved to LaSalle, Illinois in the 1990s. A private equity firm named The Riverside Company purchase JC Whintey in 2002. The main property was combined with CarParts.com, StylinTrucks.com, and AllBikeSupershop.com to create the Whitney Automotive Group in 2007. The group was purchased by US Auto Parts in 2010. As you can see, there are many sister sites that are part of the larger parent company.

JC Whitney Affiliate Program

Partners have the choice of working with JC Whitney through Link Connector or Commission Junction. It looks like it is better to join through CJ because the commission rate is listed as 8%-10% as opposed to the 8% rate listed on Link Connector. It’s also interesting that the official affiliate page on the JC Whitney site only missions the Commission Juntion program. I suspect this has to do with how much larger CJ is.

When I look at the JC Whitney program stats in CJ, I can see that it is a four bar (high earning) program. The EPC (earnings per 100 clicks) tends to be in the $15 range. This latter number is on the low side unless they don’t work with coupon sites that tend to skew all the numbers. I tested this by searching for “JC Whitney Coupon” and clicking on one of the links. The resolved link has affiliate tracking on it, so they work with coupon sites through their affiliate program.

Whenever you see revenue tiers like this, the merchant is referencing earnings in a given month.

Fiscal Health

U.S. Auto Parts, owner of JC Whitney, is a publicly traded stock, but just barely. The stock was trading under a dollar a share during parts of July 2013. Fortunately, it has rebounded in 2014 and now trades at $3.39 a share for a market cap of 113 million dollars. Considering the Whitney Automative Group sold for 27.5 million, the U.S. Auto Parts group is substantially larger than the former company. When compared to the likes of Autozone, Advance Auto Parts, O’Reilly Automotive, Inc, JC Whitney is a much, much smaller company. It would be far easier for them to teeter to the brink than any of the aforementioned multi-billion dollar companies.